IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rco/dpaper/190.html

Complexity and Distributive Fairness Interact in Affecting Compliance Behavior

Author

Listed:
  • Bellemare, Charles

    (Université Laval)

  • Deversi, Marvin

    (LMU Munich)

  • Englmaier, Florian

    (LMU Munich)

Abstract

Filing income tax returns or insurance claims often requires that individuals comply with complex rules to meet their obligations. We present evidence from a laboratory tax experiment suggesting that the effects of complexity on compliance are intrinsically linked to distributive fairness. We find that compliance remains largely unaffected by complexity when income taxes are distributed to a morally justified charity. Conversely, complexity significantly amplifies non-compliance when income taxes appear wasted as they are distributed to a morally dubious charity. Our data further suggest that this non-compliance pattern is facilitated through the ambiguity that evolves from mostly unstrategic filing mistakes.

Suggested Citation

  • Bellemare, Charles & Deversi, Marvin & Englmaier, Florian, 2019. "Complexity and Distributive Fairness Interact in Affecting Compliance Behavior," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 190, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    • Handle: RePEc:rco:dpaper:190
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://rationality-and-competition.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/190.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Lohse, Tim & Simon, Sven A., 2021. "Compliance in teams – Implications of joint decisions and shared consequences," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    3. Alison Macintyre & Ho Fai Chan & Markus Schaffner & Benno Torgler, 2023. "National pride and tax compliance: A laboratory experiment using a physiological marker," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 18(1), pages 1-23, January.
    4. Blesse, Sebastian, 2021. "Are your tax problems an opportunity not to pay taxes? Evidence from a randomized survey experiment," ZEW Discussion Papers 21-040, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    5. Blesse, Sebastian, 2023. "Do your tax problems make tax evasion seem more justifiable? Evidence from a survey experiment," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • D01 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • H26 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Tax Evasion and Avoidance

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rco:dpaper:190. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Viviana Lalli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://rationality-and-competition.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.